Contemporary American Artists 


ALBERI STERNER 
His Lite and His Art 


CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ARTISTS: 
ALBERT STERNER 


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ALBERT STERNER 
Meee Life and His Art 


By RALPH FLINT 


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PAYSON & CLARKE LTD 
New York 


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COPYRIGHT 1927 BY PAYSON & CL 
J. J. LITTLE AND IVES COMPANY, NEW YO! 


LIST OF PLATES 


Frontispiece. PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST BY HIMSELF 


10. 
. Hart Govind Govit—Drawing 


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AN EARLY ILLUSTRATION IN THE Century Magazine 
ILLUSTRATION FOR The Marriage of William Ashe 
ILLUSTRATION FOR A Mediaeval Story in Harper's Magazine 
NEWPporT WHARF—Lithograph 

PHOEBE—Water colour 

Dr. TRUMPP OF MUNICH—Lithograph 

THE SonN—Lithograph 

IN A STupDIO—Pastel 

THE STRANGER—Lithograph 

MarTIN BIRNBAUM—Lithograph 


CONCEPTUAL DRAWING 


. EMILY ELsAs—Oil painting 


Mrs. RoBert LOCHER—Drawing 


. YOUNG WOMAN LAUGHING—Red chalk 
. LEON PANTALIDES—Charcoal 


NupE—Red chalk 
NupE—Monotype 

EDMOND QUINN—Lithograph 
In A STUDIO—Oil painting 


. MARVIN BRECKINRIDGE—Drawing 
. NupE—Black chalk 
. ROBERT AITKEN, SCULPTOR—Pencil drawing 


THE DRESSING RooM—Red chalk 


. PORTRAIT DRAWING 
. CONCEPTUAL DRAWING 
. BoDANSKY—Drawing 


AN East INDIAN—Tempera 
DEATH AND THE MALDEN—Conceptual pen drawing on stone 


LIST OF PLATES (CONTINUED) 


. Mary HALL as LaDy MacBeETH—Oil painting 
. THE PassiIonN—Oil painting 

. HAROLD GouLD—Lithograph 

. Mrs, Atpis—Drawing 

. Amos ToMMy—Lithograph 

. NupE—Red chalk drawing 


PORTRAIT OF A YOUNG WOMAN—Oil painting 
PORTRAIT DRAWING 
My Son HAROLD (1916-17)—Oil painting 


. ROSPIGLIOSI—Pastel 

. CATHARINE CAZALE WHITE—Drawing 

. CONCEPTUAL DRAWING FOR LITHOGRAPH ‘SNOCTURNE” 
. NUDE RECUMBENT—Red chalk 

. THING OF THE SEA—Lithograph 

. FLORA—Pastel 

. THE MOTHER OF My WIFE—Oil painting 


ENIGMA—Monotype 


. C.C. W.—Drawing 

. Mrs. KINNEY—Oil painting 

. Mrs. CAMMANN—Pastel 

. CORNELIA CHAPIN—Drawing 

. JAMES ANDERSON—Oil painting 
. FLORA—Oil painting 

. My MoTHER—Monotype 


AN ITALIAN GIRL—Oil painting 
PORTRAIT DRAWING 

THE GRAY CAPE—Oil painting 
NUDE—CHARCOAL 


. NupbdE—Black chalk 

. Koski—Oil painting 

. CONCEPTUAL DRAWING FOR LITHOGRAPH ‘‘WILDERNESS” 
. LEE BARTLETT GODDARD—Pastel 

. NEURASTHENIC—Drypoint 

. PETER WIDENER—Drawing 

. Mrs. Hay—Oil painting 


ALBERT STERNER 
Hs Life and His Art 


HE field of art offers a wide and varied territory for cultivation 
and exploration, with its highlands, lowlands and interme- 
diate levels to suit all comers. Ata distance these diversely con- 

ditioned areas present a well-patterned panorama, diapered like some 
richly agrarian region whose contrastingly textured patches give the ap- 
pearance of a colourful map. While there are no actual territorial divi- 
sions to limit free passage among the various localities save what the 
exigencies of human nature may set up for each individual, usage man- 
ages, however, to establish lines of demarcation that in time assume 
the properties and proportions of boundary walls. In this way a bar- 
rier may be said to have arisen between illustration and painting proper 
in America sufficiently formidable to presuppose a passage from the one 
to the other an unlikely if not altogether impossible event, as if a once 
restricted talent could not be developed for service in the higher fields 
of art. This is indeed a poor and trivial claim in the light of the old mas- 
ters’ versatility in turning at will from exalted pictorial tasks to the fash- 
ioning of a shopkeeper’s sign or some household trifle; yet the fact re- 
mains that until a decade ago when many similar distinctions were 
swept into the discard, this assumption of incompatibility between 
painting and illustration obtained with almost sovereign author- 
ity in the studios. Pictorial talents are not so readily classified to-day as 
they were in the last century when illustration was such a highly cen- 
tralized profession and meant a literal confinement within the ranks, 
so that the phenomenon of an artist moving freely among the various 
departments of the arts is no uncommon thing. But to the historian of 
art the effecting of such a transition in the earlier days when there were 

7 


ALBERT STERNER 


no breaches in the barriers becomes an act of genuine importance and 
worthy of record. 

Among contemporary American artists who have at one time or an- 
other made illustration their concern, Albert Sterner stands out 
conspicuously as one of the very few to change his pictorial markings 
and to emerge a full-fledged painter. He has accomplished that diff- 
cult passage from zone to zone as perhaps only Winslow Homer did 
before him, for the great marine painter also laboured assiduously for 
many years in the field of illustration before passing into the fair pas- 
turage of pure painting. In respect to this curious divisional ruling of 
the art world a considerable company of men might be cited as proving 
the case in one way or another, since John La Farge was another reso- 
lute painter with illustrative beginnings, and Edwin Abbey, one of 
the most illustrious to attempt the passage, remained a confirmed 1l- 
lustrative painter to the end, in spite of his ambitious and widely ac- 
claimed public decorations at home and his large historical canvases 
abroad. Joseph Pennell, also of this early group, concerned himself 
with matters of painting all his life, yet he was an out-and-out illustra- 
tor at heart and openly confessed himself as such; and there have been 
other well-known men with strong illustrative tendencies at one time or 
another, like Metcalf, Blashfield, Vedder, and Wiles. 

But it is extremely doubtful if the annals of American art present 
any more conclusive proof that the metamorphosis from the legitimate 
if restricted profession of illustration to the honourable and ancient call- 
ing of painting is within the bounds of possibility and reason, than the 
case of Albert Sterner. Belonging at one time to the top flight of illus- 
trators, alongside Abbey, Pyle, Frost, Reinhart, Remington, and Smed- 
ley, he has risen by virtue of his innate ability and self-determination to 
make for himself as distinguished a place in painting as that which he 
once enjoyed as a leading contributor to the pages of Harper’s, Scrib- 
ner’s, and the Century. The story of this development mocks any dog- 
matic ruling as to what may or may not be expected in these matters, 


8 


ALBERT STERNER 


and it should be a source of much inspiration to young illustrators who 
may fancy themselves debarred from the delights of the more serious, 
more searching phases of art by any arbitrary conditioning of their 
calling. 


LBERT EDWARD STERNER was born in London on a certain 
Sunday morning in March 1863 when that sober city was in a 
particular flurry over the impending marriage of the Prince of Wales 
to the beautiful Princess Alexandra of Denmark. His mother, an Eng- 
lishwoman and ardent royalist, was so taken with the popular prince that 
she named her eldest born in his honour; and in fact was actually out in 
her carriage to admire the gayly bedecked thoroughfares when she was 
obliged to hurry home for the event which rightfully opens this narra- 
tive. Curiously enough young Albert Edward grew up to bear a marked 
facial resemblance to Edward the Seventh, and to develop an identical 
handwriting running loop for loop. His father was an American of 
German extraction, a Bavarian by birth who had gone to California at 
the time of the famous gold rush in 1849 and had been naturalized in 
Sacramento some years later. Returning to England he became a suc- 
cessful merchant, and for a while the Sterners were very well to do. 
Six children were born to them after which the family went to live in 
Brussels. Here the boys got a thorough grounding in French, and 
among young Albert’s still vivid impressions of those days are the cart- 
loads of wounded soldiers being drawn through the Belgian capital 
at the time of the Franco-Prussian war, and the laying of tanbark in the 
streets where they were quartered. 

When Albert was eleven years old, his family returned to England, 
settling in Birmingham. He was sent to King Edward’s School, an 
endowed free institution of very ancient tradition and one that by its 
very name must have appealed mightily to his mother’s royalist nature. 
Admission was to be had only by competitive examination, and young 

9 


ALBERT STERNER 


Sterner entered proudly at the head of a field of seven hundred boys. 
He proved to be a good student, with a special aptitude for literature 
and languages, and rose rapidly with many prizes to his credit. But the 
significant item about this chapter of his career was the outstanding ex- 
cellence of his drawing papers which were found so satisfactory that 
the head master arranged his release for two afternoons each week to 
attend the art classes of the Birmingham Art Institute. There he re- 
ceived an elementary training in freehand drawing, the copying of 
casts and other objects which no doubt served constantly to whet the 
boyish interest he had for drawing, well attested by some of his small 
sketchbooks of this period. One in particular contains some pencil 
drawings of* prize cattle made at the Birmingham Agricultural Show 
when he was about twelve years old, remarkable in their sincere and 
earnest character. Like Burne Jones, who had also been a student at 
King Edward’s School, he was marked as a painting person from the 
start, although there does not seem to be anything in the family ar- 
chives to argue an artistic inheritance, unless the linguistic talents 
of an uncle or the fine dramatic ability of one of his brothers are to 
be considered. When he was fourteen, the family fortunes suffered 
severe reverses, and he was forced to leave school. He entered a local 
lamp factory at five shillings a week, but the lampmakers were not im- 
pressed with the caricatures and juvenile scribblings that invariably 
found their way onto the margins of the company invoices, and so he 
went perforce to the C. G. Bonehill gun factory where the business 
round was made somewhat less monotonous by his interest in the fasci- 
nating processes of gunmaking. He was clearly not of a clerical cut, 
but his proclivity for art was to be denied fulfillment for some little 
time to come. : 

Sterner pére, with his coffers empty, decided to try his luck once 
more in America, and, in spite of the protests of his staunchly British 
wife, the family embarked for the New World, leaving Albert, then a 
youth of fifteen, to be shipped to an uncle in Germany. This relation, 
10 


ALBERT STERNER 


a prosperous Frankforter of generous girth and small intellect, soon 
apprenticed him to a remote cousin, one Michael Fliirscheim of Gagge- 
nau, who owned a flourishing iron foundry in that village—in fact he 
might be said to have owned the town since the entire personnel of Gag- 
genau was absorbed by the foundry. Albert took up his duties as clerk 
and confidential secretary with this domineering ironman, and slept in a 
little room over a stable, although he took his meals with the family. 
There was the long dinner table formally set out with candles and 
plate, and the most agreeable Frau Fliirscheim, invariably in black 
velvet, presiding at the board. Frau Fliirscheim was apparently the one 
consoling feature of this Gaggenau episode, for she was a woman of 
wide talents and accomplishments, having studied the pianoforte with 
the famous Hans von Biilow. She would often play in the evenings, 
and this music must have fallen on the artistically minded apprentice 
as balm indeed. Life was very irksome to young Sterner in Gagge- 
nau, but he was sometimes able in odd moments to sketch out of doors 
in this picturesque valley of the Murg. Being severely reprimanded 
by the ironmaster one day for such arrant foolishness, he remon- 
strated and the overlord of the town kicked the whole business, easel 
and all, into the river. After a full dose of Gaggenau and its restric- 
tions, he ran away to Freiburg, a lovely old world town where he led 
a gay and roving life for some six months until his uncle, getting wind 
of the matter, bade him return at once to Frankfort. Apparently the 
situation was too much for the perturbed uncle to cope with, for he 
abruptly packed him off to his family in America. 

Like father, like son; and once again a Sterner cried “Westward- 
ho!” He embarked alone at Antwerp for that land of promise where his 
father had always hoped his sons might grow up, and toward the close of 
1879 he landed at New York, thence making his way to Chicago where 
the Sterners then lived. No doubt this young Continental looked wide 
of the mark as he trod the weary round of the office-seeker, but he even- 
tually got a start with the well-known lithographers, Shober and 

II 


ALBERT STERNER 


Carqueville, to whom he had submitted a book of sketches made on ship- 
board. A little later on he worked for a German named Bertram 
who had a studio on the top floor of the Ashland Block where embryonic 
artists were wont to work out their devious problems. Here he made 
accurate copies of commodities for engraved catalogues, and became 
expert at drawing on the block shoes, asparagus, tennis rackets and 
other household articles. During this period he ran the gamut from 
stained glass designing to turning out menu cards, and for a while he 
worked for Walter Burridge, the well known scene painter, who was 
then presiding over the decorative destinies of the Grand Opera House. 
There he toiled for twelve dollars a week and for his first job was as- 
signed with Peter the paint-boy the not inconsiderable task of priming 
a back-drop forty feet by forty, at the end of which heroic performance 
he fell exhausted to the floor. As he advanced in the art of scene paint- 
ing he was allowed to paint part of a tree on an enormous back-drop. 
The story goes that on the opening night, having been caught by Bur- 
ridge out front lost in admiration of his handiwork, he was dragged 
back stage by the ear. Harry B. Smith, the librettist, and he were close 
friends at this juncture, and under multiple aliases, they brought out 
a weekly publication called the Rambler, with Smith doing all the sto- 
ries, and Sterner the illustrations. Crayon portraits done from photo- 
graphs figured on his list of activities in these preliminary Chicago days, 
but after about three and a half years of this hand-to-mouth existence he 
took leave of his people and went to New York. 


T this time American illustration was beginning to get well un- 

der way. Life had just been founded and Atwood, Frost, Kemble, 

Remington, McVickar, Wenzell, and Van Schaik were constant con- 

tributors. The newcomer went to live in a typical brownstone lodging 

near the old Academy of Design in East Twenty-third Street, his third 

floor back windows abutting on those of his friend, Oliver Herford. 
12 


ALBERT STERNER 


Here he made little drawings, often with his own jingles attached, which 
he managed to sell for small sums. The first one to see the light of day 
was a quaintly naive thing about Big and Little Sister at the Piano and 
appeared in the St. Nicholas Magazine, that one treasured repository 
of youthful delights. From such humble beginnings springs many a 
masterpiece. 

Things shaped up little by little, and he was soon drawing for Life, 
then published at Broadway and Twenty-eighth Street under the guid- 
ing hand of John Ames Mitchell. He found Mitchell one day in a 
very glum mood because of the scarcity of good men available for the 
lighter side of illustration, crying, ‘““We’ve got to get new blood on the 
paper. Who istherer” The search was vain. Many years later at a 
dinner of the Society of American Illustrators, of which he was 
a founder, with some hundred and fifty well-known members about 
the board, Sterner asked Mitchell if he recollected that crucial day when 
just one more good man on the staff of Life meant salvation. 

The Harper and Century publications then began to seek the young 
illustrator. He also made sketches for the 4rt Age and many double 
page drawings of theatrical celebrities of that day—Modyjeska, Mans- 
field as Richard the Third, and Irving as Becket—and scenes from 
“As You Like It,” at Daly’s famous playhouse. 

He soon came to the conclusion that what he needed was a more 
serious technical foundation and so, by careful saving, he put by barely 
enough money for an ocean passage and six months’ stay in Paris. “It 
was a hard job to save four hundred dollars then with the small pay I 
got for my work—but I knew I had to get to Paris.” Here is the key- 
note to his whole career, fittingly summed up in the motto—Per aspera 
ad astra. 

It was at the original Julian’s Academy in the Faubourg St. Denis 
that Sterner began his training in all seriousness, working there un- 
der Boulanger and Lefévre. An incident in one of the life classes 
brought Sterner into sharp conflict with the meticulous nature of the in- 

13 


ALBERT STERNER 


struction in those academic days, and may have had much to do in de- 
termining his eventual decision to work out his problems on his own. 
It was the custom—and no doubt still is—to allot places each Monday 
morning according to the merit of the preceding week’s compositions, 
and Sterner, being among the top of the list, set his easel close up 
to the model after the fashion of the teaching of the day. This par- 
ticular model happened to be an old vagrant of uncertain years with 
a varicose vein on his right calf. “I was thoroughly disgusted at the 
time and could not seem to draw it. Boulanger, on his rounds, stared 
at me in amazement and asked me why I had not drawn the vein. When 
I remonstrated that I would make a hole in the paper if I went on fuss- 
ing with it any longer, he cried in a fury, “But damnation, draw it even 
if you have to make a hole in the board!” 

He also worked at the Beaux Arts under GérOéme, and found that 
the Paris schools were of a much more professional character than 
he had supposed, the teachers silently marking the better men and pay- 
ing little regard to the unpromising students. He had no studio of his 
own on this visit but managed to send back to the New York publish- 
ers little pen and ink drawings, variations of two people engaged in 
conversation—‘‘comics,” they were called—to which quips and tags 
could be conveniently added, and which brought him his living. 

This Paris training, however brief, enabled Sterner to acquire a 
new angle on technical matters, in which he admits discovering that 
patience was a prime ingredient. When he returned to New York, 
after these studies, he found that he could command more money for 
his work because of his surer technical grasp, and this improved status 
quo made a profound impression on him at the time. His clientéle 
was now greatly enlarged, and he was contributing to all the leading 
publications. Peter F. Collier was just appearing in the field then, and 
he established a more liberal standard of prices to artists and writers. 
Other interesting figures in the New York magazine circles of that 
period were Walter Appleton Clark, Mary Mapes Dodge, and Lewis 
14 


ALBERT STERNER 


W. Fraser (all connected with St. Nicholas), Howard Pyle, Edwin 
Abbey, W. T. Smedley (with his splendid wash drawings), Reginald 
Birch (who illustrated “Little Lord Fauntleroy”), Hopkinson Smith, 
A. B. Brennan, and Alfred Parsons. 

When Sterner was about twenty-seven, he once more set sail for 
Paris, and after a while settled in a studio of his own at 112, Boule- 
vard Arago. Like so many before and after him, the young il- 
lustrator soon found that the schools, while educationally and techni- 
cally helpful, failed to nourish the inner man to any degree, and he 
decided to seek salvation wherever he might find it. He met any num- 
ber of interesting artists at the famous “Chat Noir” in the rue de Douai, 
and probably picked up many helpful hints that were not to be found in 
the curricula of the schools. Such celebrities as Steinlen, Caran d’Ache, 
Forain, and Willette were the headliners at this café where the noted Ro- 
dolphe Salis presided, and out of the flow of their wit and merriment 
sprang the original idea of cabaret entertainment. In 1891 Sterner 
sent his first contribution to the Salon, a canvas called “le Céliba- 
taire” which was not only to bring him an Honourable Mention but 
considerable publicity as well. Raoul Ponchon, a clever poet and 
feuilletonist of the time, was accustomed to review the annual salons 
in a series of verses published in the Courrier Francais, and he amus- 
ingly summarized Sterner’s painting in the following stanzas: 


Ah. le pauv’ Célibataire 
De Sterner 
Ow il aTlair 
De s’ennuyer! 
Enfin sil ne veut 
Pas se marier 
C’ est pas notre affaire! 


This canvas, all velvety shadow save where the flickering firelight 
revealed a man lost in reverie, caused Boulanger, standing before his 
15 


ALBERT STERNER 


student’s picture in the salon to remark, “Mon ami, vous avez joué 
dans la basse—maits vous avez bien joué.” Boulanger spoke more pro- 
phetically than he knew, for “le Célibataire,’ now the property of 
the Lotos Club in New York, has turned even blacker with time. 

It was during this second stay in Paris that Sterner met Oscar Wilde 
through Stuart Merrill, an American poet with symbolistic tendencies, 
and Wilde sat for his portrait in the Boulevard Arago studio. It was a 
pen drawing which he enthusiastically autographed, and he later wrote 
to the painter expressing his hope that he might sit one day for a more 
serious study. At the time of Wilde’s imprisonment this little black- 
and-white sketch by Sterner, originally published in /a Plume, was the 
only available likeness of the poet in Paris, and was hawked down the 
boulevards. 

Another interesting sitter was Dauphin Meunier whose “Bréviaires 
pour Mes Dames” was just then something of a sensation. Ernest 
Dowson and Retté, the poet, were also of Sterner’s intimate circle. It 
was at this time that he made his first few tentative lithographs, working 
at Lemercier’s. But it was painting which claimed his attention then to 
the exclusion of almost everything else. 

One day, in trouble over a larger canvas than he had hitherto under- 
taken, he begged the help and criticism of Eugéne Grasset, the cele- 
brated decorative painter who lived in a studio next door. The younger 
painter deplored his lack of style, whereupon the master exclaimed: “Le 
Style—n’en parlez pas, mon amt, ca viendra comme une maladie dans la 
nuit—trop tot.” 


N his return to America Sterner was invited to enter a competi- 

tion for illustrating a new edition of George William Curtis’ 
“Prue and I,” a book which had lain fallow for some thirty years. J. H. 
McVickar, Charles H. Johnson and he were the three men chosen 


for this trial by illustration, with Sterner emerging the victor. He made 
16 


ALBERT STERNER 


one hundred pen-and-ink and wash drawings for this charmingly se- 
rene tale by the well-known editor of Harper’s “Easy Chair,” and this 
marked the first really important achievement in his career. The draw- 
ings are scattered through the text, and the book, published at the 
Christmas season, was a pronounced success from the start. With a 
handsome advance payment in his pocket and royalties to come, 
he again took ship for Paris, considerably elated at having got well un- 
der way and facing the future with a new confidence. 

Among the many articles and stories which he illustrated at this time 
was a tale by Brander Matthews who wrote him an enthusiastic appreci- 
ation. “I want to tell you how delighted I was with the three illustra- 
tions to ‘Etelka Talmeyr.’ You made the girl’s face in the first picture 
just what it ought to be and you know how rarely an author is satisfied 
with his illustrator.” 

His first public exhibition was held at Keppel’s East Sixteenth Street 
gallery in 1894, featuring the “Prue and I” drawings. A half dozen 
paintings and some twenty other drawings were also shown, among 
them studies for “The Ball” which he sent to the big water colour exhibi- 
tion of that year. W. Lewis Fraser wrote an appreciative foreword to 
the Keppel catalogue. “Among the younger artists whose progress it 
has been a delight to me to follow, few have interested me as much as 
Albert Sterner, for, from his earliest flounderings in the pages of the 
weeklies to his delightfully accomplished performances of to-day, he 
has been so naively fin-de-siécle in the sense that tradition has had lit- 
tle hold on him and that he has tried to work out a way which should be 
his own. Of course, in its fullest development, this is impossible— 
Sterner, as all others, has profited by what has gone before—but he still 
tries to do things which puzzle the critics and render them unhappy— 
not that Sterner is extreme. I could not imagine him being found, for 
example, among the little group of Avancés now exhibiting in Broad- 
way. It is well for him that he was born with the possession of strong 
artistic intuitions, otherwise, I think, he would have come to grief: for, 

I7 


ALBERT STERNER 


after all theories and formulas have been advanced, discussed, and prac- 
tised, it is the inner essence of the artist which makes the work of art. 
He is certainly entitled to a high rank and a foremost place among 
American illustrators. It is therefore to me a genuine pleasure to know 
that the American public has given so hearty a welcome to his charming 
obbligato to ‘Prue and I.’” This same group of drawings was 
also shown at Earles’ Galleries in Philadelphia. 

The Water Color Society exhibition of that year—the twenty-seventh 
annual—was productive of interesting press comments for the historian 
of art. It was held in the old Academy of Design at Twenty-third 
Street and Fourth Avenue, a building designed after the Doge’s Pal- 
ace in Venice. The decoration committee went in heavily for “hang- 
ings, arms, and lanterns” according to the custom then in vogue, and 
a contemporary critic wrote that “the draping of the doorways quite 
fills the householder, in search of good colour schemes, with delight.” 
Here is clearly an early manifestation of what was to become in time 
one of the leading industries of the town. Sterner’s “The Ball” was 
variously received, such conclusions as “one of the gems of the exhibi- 
tion,” ‘‘a satisfactory attempt to imitate the kaleidoscopic colour of For- 
tuny,” and “though ambitious is unsatisfactory” being recorded in the 
columns of the New York papers. Some of the other artists showing 
at this Twenty-seventh annual were Childe Hassam, Robert Blum (with 
his Japanese sketches), J. Alden Weir, Walter Shirlaw, Frederick Rem- 
ington, and Willard Metcalf. One critic complained bitterly that the 
strong blue background which Sargent had recently introduced into 
his portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth was cropping up every- 
where in the exhibitions; and Weir, according to the same deponent, 
was working a combined “Mary Cassatt-Boutet de Monvel-Japanesque” 
style, which seems at this distance to have been a not inconsiderable feat. 
Sterner was beginning to be called “that clever young illustrator” and 
when his “Prue and I’ exhibition went to Keppel’s Chicago Gallery 


he was hailed by a local scribe as “the foremost of American illustra- 
18 


ALBERT STERNER 


tors,’ but he was “at once the critics’ delight and their despair” be- 
cause he insisted on being original. 

Zorn was in New York just then and was being well lionized. 
Sterner expressed a wish for a criticism from him. He accordingly 
went with considerable trepidation to where the Swedish painter was 
working in Twenty-third Street—a sort of bedroom studio in the gen- 
eral state of picturesque disorder such as Sargent used to paint with gusto 
on rainy days—with a reproduction of “The Ball” under his arm. This 
painting showed a large company of dancers in a handsome interior, 
worked out with considerable detail; but Zorn merely gave it a casual 
glance as he threw it on the bed, saying, “Oh, that’s a grand affair,” and 
went ahead with the business of trying out a new model who had just 
arrived. He had been dining apparently the night before at a certain 
well known house and his attention during dinner had been attracted 
by the generous proportions of one of the maids; and as he was quite 
direct when it came to matters of the studio, it never occurred to him 
that selecting models from among his host’s servants was anything out 
of the ordinary. Sterner found him equally surprising and unconven- 
tional several years later when he had the honour of escorting him 
through an Academy exhibition, for instead of noting the most Zorn- 
like canvases with an approving glance, he scorned them all only to 
pick out a little New England scene all gentle grays and timidity as 
the best thing in the show. 

In 1894 Sterner was working in his Roslyn studio on a series of il- 
lustrations for a ten volume edition of Poe’s works, which was being 
edited by Edmund Clarence Stedman and Professor George Wood- 
bury for Stone and Kimball. He received a letter from Stedman 
anent these drawings which sheds some light on the problem of the il- 
lustrator. It must be noted in explanation that three of the series were 
published in the Century prior to the appearance of the new edition. 
“Your three drawings in the Century were so different from anything 
I had in mind that at first glance I was scarcely in sympathy with them. 

19 


ALBERT STERNER 


That feeling, however, I have learned from experience always comes 
when one sees anything absolutely new to his preconceived notions. 
So I will acknowledge that the more I have seen them the less disposed 
I am to criticize them and have concluded that it will be necessary to 
become familiar with the entire series before reaching an adequate esti- 
mate of your conceptions. I remember that when I saw the Pre-Raphael- 
ite illustrations of Tennyson (in 1856?) by Millais, Hunt, Rossetti, etc., 
I did not like nor comprehend them. Your ‘Red Death’ is forceful, and 
both ‘grotesque’ and ‘arabesque’-—P. S. I am still of the opinion that 
the novelty of your whole series is affected adversely by the issue of the 
Century drawings. It is ‘discounted’ as we say.” But the effect was ap- 
parently in no way discounted for at least one critic was moved to ob- 
serve that Sterner was “one of the half dozen of our illustrators who aim 
above a merely literal and pictorial transcription of the text.” 


HE following year Sterner started on another series of continen- 
tal wanderings that took him again to France, and to Germany, 
Italy and England. Many new influences were brought to bear on the 
artist’s development during the two and a half years in Germany, and 
his status as a serious, ambitious, and many-sided artist became increas- 
ingly defined. He won a gold medal with his painting, “Harold and 
the Deer Hound,” at the Internationale Ausstellung at the Glaspalast 
in Munich; and there, in the very city where Aloys Senenfelder had 
invented the process of lithography, he again took up work on the stone. 
A group of his prints, displayed in the Odeonsplatz windows of Lit- 
tauer—the “Knoedler” of Munich—caught the discerning eye of the 
director of the Print Room of the Alte Pinakothek who promptly ac- 
quired a selection on the spot without knowing whom they were by. A 
similar selection was later made for the Kupferstich Kabinet of the 
Royal Collection in Dresden, and Sterner began to find himself more 
and more committed to the stone, although he was not to take it up again 
20 


ALBERT STERNER 


to any extent for a decade or more. The well-known “Dame am Was- 
ser,’ printed in two tones, was done at that time. He found exacting 
craftsmen in Munich, among them Leo Putz, Angelo Jank, and Fritz 
Erler, and worked in the fine printing establishment of Klein and Vol- 
bert where he gained much valuable information on the technique of 
lithography. He was also a contributor to the Flegende Blatter and 
Jugend during these Munich years. On his eventual return to the United 
States, he settled in Nutley, New Jersey. It was at this period that he 
seriously turned his attention to the making of portrait drawings, while 
simultaneously came his first commission for the illustrating of Mrs. 
Humphrey Ward’s novels. 

When he held his next one-man show at Keppel’s in New York, Mrs. 
York, writing in the New York Sun, complimented him for letting the 
public have a “glimpse of the artist in his own unfettered personality” 
and for not including in the exhibition his magazine illustrations, no mat- 
ter how excellent. Here was the artist in him taking definite precedence 
over the illustrator, for his “Eleanor” drawings had made a consider- 
able sensation and had prompted Sadakichi Hartmann, the art critic 
and historian, to remark that “Sterner is, with Albert Brennan, my fa- 
vorite illustrator.” Another writer, sensing his breaking away from il- 
lustration, wrote: “He has allowed himself the luxury of appearing ‘in 
propria persona,’ ”’ and this observation only goes to show how general 
the sense of division between the two fields of artistic endeavour was. 
Sterner himself once defined his position in these early days when he 
said, “I am not an illustrator but I illustrate,” a distinction for once 
with a difference. The Sterner psychology must have given Mrs. York 
much food for thought, for she found his “Study of a Lady” to be a 
painting in which “the undulating movement is carried through the 
hands in a manner somewhat Boldiniesque, which to many of us is 
synonymous with snakiness and forced diablerie, smacking of deca- 
dency.” This mauvish tidbit of critical analysis is eloquent witness to 
the tricky tenor of those days, but her review is rounded off by the as- 

21 


ALBERT STERNER 


sertion that the serious side of the artist is well in evidence, markedly pre- 
senting ‘qualities of temperament, intellectuality, and character, where- 
in so many of the craft fail.” 

Travel and work and exhibitions followed in rapid sequence for the 
next few years. His red-chalk drawings (“sanguines”) were becoming 
a sort of hallmark for the artist, and one of the finest was his portrait of 
Mrs. Ward done in the library of her Grosvenor Place house in Lon- 
don. Sterner was at this time doing illustrations for Mrs. Ward’s “The 
Marriage of William Ashe,” and it was in a little old-fashioned house 
in Elmtree Road, close by Israel Zangwill and Oscar Ashe, that he 
made these drawings, working by gas-light during the foggy London 
days. 


CLEAR picture of the shifting state of illustration at the start of 

the twentieth century is gotten in one of Sterner’s many open 
letters to the press. Under the heading “Illustrations that [llustrate,” 
he wrote to the Commercial Advertiser: “It is not at all surprising that 
a vigorous protest has been made regarding the poor quality of work 
commonly known as illustration now being dished up in enormous 
quantities to the public. None will hail this protest with more delight 
than the few serious and well-equipped artists who have given them- 
selves thoroughly to the study of making good and adequate illustrations, 
and although the perfection and development of the half-tone process— 
a method of reproduction much more expeditious and far cheaper than 
the more artistic mode of the art of wood engraving—has in a measure 
been responsible for the reproduction of useless pictorial matter, it is 
not the only factor that has worked in the deterioration of the high stand- 
ard set in this art in America, and which reached its zenith some twelve or 
fifteen years ago. The trashy quality of the greater part of the work now 
being put forth from the printing presses is gradually vitiating and un- 
dermining the good taste of the major portion of the reading public of 
22 


ALBERT STERNER 


the United States.” He likened the “splendid, serious, illustrative work 
of a decade ago” to a “dainty and slowly built edifice of art” almost 
completely swept away. “We are now in the midst of a period of mean- 
ingless illustration” where “quantity rather than quality obtains,”’ where 
“drawings are wanted over-night and ‘Rush’ is the motto.” He further 
cited in proof of the sorry state of affairs, a man of his acquaintance who 
had for some time vigorously refrained from buying illustrated books 
for his children, and this leads one to speculate on what course would 
be left such a father to-day in order to keep his offspring uncontami- 
nated by the tabloids and comic strips of a ruder age. 

Like Whistler before him, Sterner has always -risen briskly to parry 
and thrust in the cause of art. An episode which comes to light is the 
controversy that raged in the New York Sun over his reply to 
an “American Woman” who had publicly protested the lack of “nicety” 
in John Luther Long’s then recently published story of ““Madame But- 
terfly.” It furthermore brings very apropos a Butterfly touch into the 
narrative, although it provides no Baronet. This correspondence cen- 
ters about the so-called “American Girl” idea which has always been a 
prime factor in American illustration, although it seems like a shot in 
the dark to couple the various statuesque versions that Wenzell, Gibson, 
Christy, Fisher, et al, once turned out with the gay, larking young 
things that bear the John Held, Jr., hall-mark of 1927. Asking if this self- 
appointed public champion of “niceness” had ever stopped to consider 
that there might possibly be “more things in heaven and earth than are 
contained in her philosophy,” and asserting that “‘art and literature are 
qualities which have the privilege, nay, claim the right, to deal with sub- 
jects which now and then might reach beyond the enormously keen 
and comprehensive faculties of the ‘American Woman,’ ” he continued 
with continental warmth and emphasis: ‘The art of America—and 
here I use the word in its broadest sense—has suffered long enough 
from just this pernicious ‘niceness’ born of a conventional false modesty 
and the remains of a narrow Puritanism, limiting hopelessly all great 


23 


ALBERT STERNER 


efforts in the arts. We have had this ‘nice’ American girl drawn for 
us until we are sick of her. She has been written about, this grown-up 
school girl, ad nauseam.” Replies to this epistle came thick and fast, 
and Sterner was referred to as “your German correspondent,” among 
other things. 

Another issue that caused him to rise in revolt was the “hors con- 
cours” system then in vogue with the American Water Color Society, by 
which members were permitted to exhibit their work without being 
passed on by the jury. At a meeting of the members shortly after the 
thirty-first annual exhibition, he boldly attacked the old guard by tell- 
ing them that the exhibition just closed had been made up largely of 
“unmitigated rubbish,” and that far from being what it professed to be— 
an artists’ exhibition—it was “in truth a little below what might reason- 
ably be expected of a society of mediocre amateurs.” He therefore pro- 
posed to remedy the situation by reducing the size of the exhibitions, 
enlarging the number of jurymen, and curtailing the “hors concours” 
rights of the members. 

At another time he wrote emphatically to the press on the action of 
Pearson’s Magazine in presenting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art 
a drawing by a contemporary illustrator. “In the firm belief that the 
quality of the pictorial matter put forth by our daily journals and maga- 
zines is a potent if perhaps unconscious factor in elevating or degrading 
the taste of the people, I hail this opportunity to endorse most thoroughly 
the movement now on foot to establish a permanent collection of the 
work of American draughtsmen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 
New York. The vast interest evinced in picture making for the press 
(in its big sense) to-day and the universal use of reproductive methods 
to enable creative design of any kind to be spread to all corners of the 
earth point undoubtedly to a democratic renaissance in art. Whether 
such a tendency is finer or more fruitful in high achievement than a more 
exclusive and aristocratic art period it is not now my purpose to discuss. 
But if this universal demand for pictorial matter exists and our papers 
24 


ALBERT STERNER 


and periodicals prove that it does, then it is necessary that the people 
should be taught to distinguish at least in an elementary way the good 
from the bad.” Sterner must have to a certain degree previsioned the 
pictorial deluge that was to sweep over the illustrative levees of the 
nineteenth century when he wrote this document, for he felt even then 
the need of raising a standard high enough to be seen above the rising 
waters. 

Nor were the publishers of that epoch any more exempt from 
Sterner’s shafts than the academicians or the illustrative middlemen. In 
a Chicago interview he roundly rated them for holding preconceived no- 
tions of what an artist should or should not draw. ‘They allow him no 
stimulating choice. Twenty-five years ago public taste had not crys- 
tallized as it has now and the editor did not see fit to ordain that every 
other picture should contain an expansive-eyed child sitting on a nur- 
sery floor among a clutter of toys.””’ (This must have been during the 
Jessie Wilcox Smith era of illustration.) ‘Neither was there an impera- 
tive demand for a statuesque and virginal creature strolling beside the 
usual athletic and correctly sartorial collegian. They are very tender of 
the feelings of the dear public, these editors. Prudishness and com- 
mercialism, these are the two enemies of fine progress. It is a long 
struggle and involves many heartaches, but it must be made. There 
must be less work and vastly better; fewer men and more talent.” 


TERNER continued to show his work publicly, with the portrait 
drawings well to the front. Again at Keppel’s; also at the Bauer- 
Folsom Galleries at 396 Fifth Avenue. “Dr. Trumpp” and “Mrs. Fitz- 
roy Carrington” were among these new offerings, with “Harold and the 
Deer Hound” reappearing after the Munich days. Later this collec- 
tion was sent to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence where 
it had a genuine success. A local scribe avowed the portrait drawings 
lively enough to make him forget the “mere chalk and paper mummery”’ 


25 


ALBERT STERNER 


of the business, adding that years of illustration had been equipping him 
for this new style of work. “He is without fads and the slurring over of 
difficulties, and it is one of the notable events of the year.’”’ Soon after 
the Providence exhibition the artist took up his residence in Newport, 
where he stayed for several years. Besides helping to found the New- 
port Art Association, he taught in an art school dependent on it, which 
several resident painters organized in the remodeled studio of Richard 
Morris Hunt. 

When Sterner was once more settled in New York, he had his studio 
in Gramercy Park at the National Arts Club on the south side, and 
there he painted his Academy offering for 1919. The following year 
he was elected an Associate Member of the National Academy. That 
same year saw his exhibition of portrait drawings at Knoedler’s which 
did much to expose the popular American fallacy that a portrait of any 
particular consequence must be done in oils. This sort of crayon por- 
trait which Sterner had been gradually developing was an offshoot of 
that delicately determined portraiture which Holbein and the French 
draughtsmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had cultivated 
with such success; and while he had obviously sat at their feet, he 
had come to achieve a definite style of his own minus the mannerisms 
or hall-marks of any bygone school. 

In 1911 Sterner held an important exhibition of lithographs and 
monotypes at the Madison Avenue and Forty-second Street Gallery 
of the Berlin Photographic Company, where Martin Birnbaum held 
forth as champion of the younger and more enterprising artists of the 
day. Birnbaum was managing a series of highly interesting exhibitions 
at that time, exhibitions that were a distinct advance over what had been 
previously accomplished in New York in the way of framing, cata- 
loguing, and showmanship; for he was practically the first to go in for 
distinctive exhibitions of any sort. He took an active interest in what 
the men were doing, going about the studios with an eager eye for 


promising material. This particular show was fairly epochal, for lith- 
26 


ALBERT STERNER 


ography had not been much in evidence in the exhibitions up to this 
time. 

This Berlin Gallery show included twenty lithographs, twenty-three 
monotypes, and ten drawings, and Royal Cortissoz of the New York 
Tribune wrote of it as the work of an artist who knew what he was 
about. “The example of Mr. Albert Sterner might well be pondered 
by the dabsters for whom the Armory show seemed to open a new 
heaven and a new earth. What is the secret of the charm which ex- 
hales from his drawings? It is at bottom, no doubt, his taste, his feel- 
ing for beauty of form, his whole artistic mastery over his medium. Nay, 
it is more than the medium. He has studied the living model, he has 
given thought to matters of composition, he has seriously interested 
himself in light and shade, and always, in season and out of season, 
he has taken care to draw like a gentleman. ‘Thorough’ has been his 
watchword—and what is the resultP He draws with perfect ease. His 
line has grace and sometimes subtlety. When he chooses to draw the 
nude as in the ‘Remorse,’ with a bold and summarizing touch, he re- 
mains sure of his truth and gets, into the bargain, something of the 
force of style. He has illustrated Poe, and the experience has had its 
effect upon his imagination. He gives us in some of his designs a 
kind of macabre poetry. But we would emphasize more particularly 
the brilliance of his technique. With the lithographs are exhibited a 
number of drawings, chiefly portraits. They disclose the same sterling 
traits that we have noted in his work on the stone, the traits of an ac- 
complished and sincere artist. They are mightily refreshing.” An- 
other Boston exhibition, this time at the Brooks Reed Gallery, and the 
local critics seized upon his monotypes again as an irrelevant gesture 
in art. F. W. Coburn of the Herald declared that Sterner had plenty 
of substance but little style, and he characterized the “monkeying with 
monotypes” as a “process of vast interest to the curious and semi- 
curious soul.” 


27 


ALBERT STERNER 


to No. 1 Lexington Avenue on the north side, where he has been 
ever since. In 1915 he held his first exhibition of pastels at Knoedler’s 
Gallery, and many of these large sized portraits were carried to the full- 
bodied point of development that Latour had so wonderfully evolved in 
France in the eighteenth century, but which was something of a novelty 
outside of France. Hitherto in America the pastel had not been taken 
very seriously, to most artists just a “sketchy thing on paper’; but 
Cortissoz again praised the artist’s work with much warmth in his art 
columns of the Tribune. “He carries conviction because he paints a 
portrait from within, sees it as a form of art, and does his work with a 
conscience.” 

On the evening of January 9 of that same year an informal meeting 
was held in Sterner’s studio to discuss ways and means for the forma- 
tion of a society of artists working in the graphic arts. Childe Has- 
sam, George Bellows, Boardman Robinson, Ernest D. Roth, George 
Elmer Brown, and Leo Mielziner were among those present and the 
upshot of this session was the founding of the Painter-Gravers of Amer- 
ica. Sterner had long had such an organization at heart to help raise 
the general quality of prints in America, and he threw himself into the 
new project with full enthusiasm. The specific object of the society 
was to further the understanding and appreciation in the United States 
of the methods used by artists for autographic reproductions of their 
work in engraving, lithography, and etching, and to give exhibitions of 
such work and to provide for sales. The membership was to consist 
of artist and patron members, and there was to be no jury “either 
in spirit or in form.” It was further planned to have each mem- 
ber invite one non-member to show with them. Some fifty promi- 
nent patrons responded to the idea, and the Painter-Gravers opened 


its campaign with an exhibition in a renovated shop in West 
28 


Naa was soon to move his studio across Gramercy Park 


ALBERT STERNER 


Fifty-eighth Street which Bellows and Sterner had transformed into 
a suite of beautifully lighted galleries, with delicate gray walls and 
tasteful furnishings made after his designs. The exhibition began in 
March with one hundred and ninety-eight prints. Ernest Haskell, 
Kerr Eby, Eugene Higgins, Maurice Sterne, John Sloan, J. Alden 
Weir, and Mahonri Young were among the charter members showing, 
and John Taylor Arms, Anne Goldthwaite, Edward Hopper, Troy 
Kinney, William Auerbach-Levy, and Jerome Myers were some of the 
invités. They were roundly acclaimed by the press, and one particular 
verdict held that such an organization filled a timely need in the town. 
The exhibition later went on tour, taking in Rochester, Buffalo, Cleve- 
land, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Toledo, Milwaukee, and Detroit, continu- 
ing until May of the following year. Sterner was elected chairman of 
the Board of Governors for the second year, and the next exhibition 
was held at the Milch Galleries. There were four shows in all, but the 
country’s preoccupation with war checked the momentum of the 
Painter-Gravers. However, the society proved a great help in establish- 
ing the co-operative art idea in the United States, and since then many 
similar movements have been launched. 

An exhibition held at the Jacques Seligmann Galleries in 1922 showed 
new manifestations in Sterner’s portrait drawings. It was his most dig- 
nified and important assertion of artistic independence and power. 
Here was the man himself in full force, completely freed from derivative 
sources or measures. Here one could study his advancing clarity of 
delineation and the growing simplicity of his handling. Clearly he had 
outdone himself in the newer portraits. In these deeply searched like- 
nesses, no unnecessary emphasis of detail marred the rounded fusion 
of the whole. 

An exhibiting organization with which Sterner has been vitally con- 
cerned from the start is the New Society. He was a charter member of 
this society of forty painters which broke away in 1919 from the rigid 
and restricting policies of the academic group to combat the idea of pre- 

29 


ALBERT STERNER 


eminence of any one school over any other, and, incidentally, any one 
medium over another. 

Among the canvases that Sterner painted at this time were “Passion” 
and the portraits of Philip Merz, Dr. Hoffman, and Mary Hall as Lady 
Macbeth. It was now more and more the medium of oil painting with 
which he was concerned and the various exhibitions to which he con- 
tributed bear record of a sequence of interesting canvases. 

Although a man of varied accomplishments, Sterner has only re- 
cently put his hand to decoration. This delayed approach does not nec- 
essarily imply any lack of interest in this direction. Rather does such 
work possess a direct appeal for him, fulfilling his favourite theory that 
all true art should spring from a direct need, should cater to some spe- 
cific want of a specific client. Perhaps the upward stages from his 
early illustrating days to his present painting period have been too 
crowded and continuous to permit any extended excursion in this how- 
ever delectable branch of art, but his few essays in large scale design 
argue a decided aptitude for such work. About the same time he un- 
dertook the decoration of a Georgian hallway in Mrs. A. M. Brinton’s 
house in Philadelphia, obviously relishing the opportunity of enlarg- 
ing his decorative borders after long years of small dimensional paint- 
ing. He has worked out there an Italianate design in monochrome— 
directly upon the carefully prepared walls. This undertaking occupied 
four months of his time. A panoramic view of garden enclosure, cut 
here and there with upstanding cypresses and leading out upon a dis- 
tant stretch of waterways and encircling hills, is the substance of his 
design. At present he is engaged on preliminary studies for a large 
group portrait of the Deaver Clinic to be completed during the winter 
of 1927-1928 and placed in the Lankenau Hospital in Philadelphia. 


30 


ALBERT STERNER 


LBERT STERNER is today at the height of his power, working 
quietly and continuously in the Gramercy Park studio that has 
housed him these many years. He maintains there an almost old world 
atmosphere of peace and seclusion as devoid as possible of the various 
intruding elements of a too demanding and democratic society. He ar- 
ranges his life with jealous care to sustain and promote just the essen- 
tials of a painter’s calling. The skyscraper apartments pressing their 
huge masses in upon the peace of his little park are to him symbols of a 
new order of things, manifestations of strange and disturbing dynamics 
in a world gone maddeningly modern. And yet, with all his strongly 
cosmopolitan old world point of view about the ordering of events, he 
is definitely wedded to New York; nor would he dream of exchanging 
his Gramercy Park for all the green acres of all the capitals of Europe. 
Neither would he turn tail and climb into his attic with the ladder pulled 
up behind, for he has seen how foolish and fatal it is for an artist to 
renounce the world and its reasonable rewards and revenues in the 
hope of finding salvation in solitude. In his unconscious careful way 
he will keep his weather eye well fixed on an old-fashioned house at 
Richmond in the Berkshire Hills with its studio, where it 1s a foregone 
conclusion the yearly visits will be increasingly extended. 

While Sterner is well aware of a world about him more scaled to 
mass than to class, and while he senses and freely discusses the great in- 
fluences active in the endeavour of the art of to-day for quick unfettering 
of bygone modes and manners and for bold launching forth into un- 
charted ways, he is enough of a classicist not to accept hastily or insin- 
cerely the new progressions or the sharper chromatic chords that are 
sounding on all sides. He clings resolutely to his conservative means, 
for way back of his honest and openly avowed Americanism lies an in- 
grained and subtle continentalism, shaping his work to a marked degree. 
The time honoured masters who stressed their points through strength, 
linked to refinement and delicacy rather than the rough and ready “shirt- 
sleeve” artists of our period, are logically his pictorial ancestors; and 

31 


ALBERT STERNER 


while he is an admirer and student of all methods of painting his deeper 
feelings are not easily stirred save by the work of the outstanding stylists, 
those men who have unequivocally registered down the alleys of time. 
It is the name of Velasquez perhaps (his greatest favourite technically) 
or Titian or Rembrandt, that colossal exponent of characterization and 
the humanities, that brings him to his feet with a painter’s thrill, that 
starts him off on an enthusiastic analysis and appreciation of the great 
attributes of all art. 

Perhaps the counterpart in this century of these old masters will be 
found some day handling the new and throbbing medium of the screen 
when that intriguing young art shall have reached a degree of sensi- 
tiveness and flexibility sufficiently attractive to men of their calibre. 
This is not at all an unlikely possibility in the light of what has already 
been accomplished in the short space of the screen’s existence. Sterner 
himself is enormously interested in the new and plastic medium of the 
motion picture and has a lively curiosity as to its future. But it is too 
early yet to expect that the artist would find satisfaction or en- 
couragement in trying to handle the unwieldly proportioned medium of 
the screen, or to cope with the many limitations that encompass motion 
picture production to-day. Yet one producer has demonstrated with his 
film masterpieces of ““Nanook of the North” and “Moana” that it can be 
done, and in time we shall see the pictorially trained artists on their way 
to Hollywood with the rest. 


T is manifestly unfair and doubtless unwise to attempt any particu- 
lar summary of a man’s work before he has brought it well towards 
completion, and Albert Sterner has far too many painting years ahead 
to be considered artistically crystallized. He stands at the threshold of 
his best and richest period, as eager for the fray as when he entered the 
competitive test for “Prue and I” back in the days of his youth. Being 
an ardent follower of the great masters in art, he has before him those 


32 


ALBERT STERNER 


stirring examples of vigorous maturity that the Venetian school affords; 
for it was Tintoretto who mounted ladders in the Ducal Palace at well 
past seventy to produce unaided his magnificent Paradiso, the world’s 
largest fresco and containing some four hundred life-size figures cir- 
cling through starry space, and it was Titian who went on painting his 
large decorative canvases into his ninety-ninth year. 

Now Sterner has been seriously concerned with painting throughout 
his career, and early received recognition for it both here and abroad. 
In the later years of his practice, oil painting has gradually come in for 
a greater share of his attention. Naturally he carries over his thorough 
draughtsmanship and his acknowledged acumen in characterization, 
acquired through long years of patient study, into his present painting 
~ period. 

The adventure, the degree of development of any sincere artist as he 
goes forward, is unknown and unlimited, but one of Sterner’s firm be- 
liefs is that Form is the foundation of all pictorial representation, colour 
but its embellishing adjunct. Therefore throughout his practice it is not 
surprising to find his painting temperate and conservative, his colour 
sense in abeyance, never mounting into any sudden chromatic flamboy- 
ance. The severe simplicity of a restricted palette suffices well for him 
and he is willing to sacrifice a great deal—perhaps too much—for the 
certainty of a clear and vital statement of character. It is this quality 
of vital sensuous expression that is so evident in the whole of his work. 

Thus Sterner by virtue of his calm and persistent courting of mod- 
eration in all things has remained unaffected by the many pictorial ex- 
periments that have been succeeding each other in swift sequence these 
past two score years. But whatever school an artist belongs to or what- 
ever style he affects, it is still for each to evolve his own technical equip- 
ment; and a long uphill road it often is until the best suited medium 
finally evolves. It may be contended that such scrupulous attention to ve- 
hicle and technique as the great masters displayed is a thing of the past, 
and that the temper of the times is too short for such intricacies and 

33 


ALBERT STERNER 


complexities; yet it is certain that whenever a message of new beauty 
comes to the painting world of sufficient depth and significance, just so 
will the one chosen to deliver it make the time and take the trouble to 
work out a vehicle of corresponding depth and significance. After all 
what matter if one phase of an artist’s work stands out more promi- 
nently than another. Is it not out of one and the same man and is it not 
one and the same message? 

I believe that I have brought together sufficient testimony from vari- 
ous and reliable sources to substantiate Sterner’s claim to eminence and 
to indicate how steady was his rise in pictorial power from the earliest 
work to the latest achievements in painting and decoration. He has 
brought to portraiture in line a new intensity through years of search- 
ing study, and this is undoubtedly his most important contribution to 
American art thus far. Lithography has given him ampler room for 
the more dramatic side of his talent, and into his line on the stone he has 
woven many moods, gay to grave, romantic, macabre, stern, subtle, sim- 
ple. He has always found this medium responsive to his demands, 
whether it be for carefully studied portrait heads or for the more imagi- 
native designs. As for etching, to judge from the few plates that exist, 
it is a medium eminently suited to his hand. His “Neurasthenic” stands 
out for its delicate mood and tender yet virile line. There should be 
more prints of this calibre to come. His drawings in red chalk and his 
innumerable studies of the nude figure in this medium are Sterner at his 
best. The monotype (generally considered a slight and playful thing) 
he is particularly fond of. Sterner proves by examples in this medium 
that the oil paint on the zinc plate, afterwards to be pressed on to paper, 
may be manipulated, if the artist so wills, quite seriously and pushed to 
a great completeness. 

The plates chosen here to illustrate the various phases of Sterner’s 
art will do more than any words to justify the distinguished position 
he holds and will set forth the sum and substance of the man himself. 


34 


ALBERT STERNER 


HIS story does not quite end with the record of Sterner’s picto- 
rial accomplishments, for the versatility of his nature inclines 
him avocationally more or less toward other fields such as acting, mu- 
sic, writing. He likes to act and he has written several plays. His free 
thinking and frankness of speech have often led him to contribute to 
the press and to mount the rostrum in the cause of art. He has been 
a contributor to the magazines on various matters of his calling and is 
at the moment preparing a book on art which should prove a valuable 
document coming from one as well informed on this subject as he is. 
Sterner places the medium of expression below the will to create. He is 
essentially a creative artist. 

He likes to think in universal terms and believes that the artist at 
work on the Parthenon frieze or the Chinese painter of the Ming period 
was one and the same kind of man as the artist of to-day. The ruff around 
the neck of the men and women Hals painted—or the less attractive 
still linen collar of to-day—are after all collars to be represented. These 
very differences, Sterner in his larger view likes to reduce to similarities 
that tie the ages together. 

In the main his creeds are sound and his artistic advice is invariably 
worth heeding. Wherever he goes he takes with him a communicating 
sense of the reality and importance of art, and he is ever striving to lift 
that veil of mystery which to the average American more or less shrouds 
such matters. At the Town Hall in New York, he spoke on just this 
point, insisting that it was the bounden duty of each individual to learn 
to approach art with an open mind and without timidity, and to look 
at the work of art for himself. Since the artist has tried to express and 
embody that intangible something which has prompted him to expres- 
sion, in the hope that the beholder will be similarly moved, he pointed out 
how necessary it was that the individual discover his own reactions to 
art in order to gain any tangible good from the experience. Sterner 

35 


ALBERT STERNER 


finds the average American timid almost to the verge of the ridiculous 
in these matters, and it is this great bogey of artistic self-consciousness 
that he has fought these many years. 

The charlatan and poseur have little chance with Sterner, for he 
keeps the subject of art on a high plane. Art that appeals to the emo- 
tions is not enough, for it must challenge the intellect as well. “The 
quality of the artist is inherent in him; he has this quality a priori like 
a fine violin.” “The artistic conception depends on the sum total of 
his personality, his experience, on the quality of the man himself.” So 
reasons Sterner, and soundly; and we undoubtedly find the cornerstone 
of the man’s makeup in his declaration that conception, the inner es- 
thetic urge, to become eventually art must be made concrete in con- 
trolled expression. “Controlled expression,’—here is the Sterner creed 
in a nutshell; with possibly a qualifying tag that this expression be con- 
trolled for a definite purpose. The futility of purposeless art rouses 
him to lively discussion, for he insists that art be related directly to the 
community and to the individual, that there can be no great artists with- 
out great audiences, and he feels it only fair to give the public what it 
wants as far as it is compatible with artistic integrity. In this light he 
holds the eccentricities of modernism to be the manifestation of a riot- 
ous individualism, and he maintains that Rubens would have laughed 
to scorn the suggestion that he paint a “Descent from the Cross” just 
for his own pleasure, just to express himself, 

It will thus be seen that Sterner is an avowed apostle of sanity and 
order, working for that perfect welding of conception and technique, an 
aim that makes for great art. Because he stands aside from the modern- 
ist movement is no sign that he is not at his post, striving with all that is 
in him for a common art of uncommon proportions. He has glimpsed 
the heights, and with this vision always in mind he has gone a long way 
toward his goal. He works content in the unceasing revelation of nat- 
ural beauty and he rejoices in the task of bringing to a restless, unheed- 
ing world something of the wonder of life that has been vouchsafed him. 
36 


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CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ARTISTS: 

ALBERT STERNER - HIS LIFE AND HIS ART 
By Ralph Flint 

Price $7.50 

PAYSON & CLARKE LTD, New York 

This volume is the first of a series to be called 
CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ARTISTS. It will fill a long felt 
want among American art lovers, who have never before had 
offered to them collected reproductions of the works of 
our foremost artists in convenient book form. 

No more suitable or auspicious subject for the first 
of such a series could have been found than Albert Sterner, 
whose career offers in itself the nucleus of the history of 
modern American art and illustration. Mr. Sterner was one 
of the now famous group of pioneers of American illustration, 
who found the craft far below the Huropean standard of that 
day, and have succeeded in raising it to a plane as high as 
that of any country. That Mr. Sterner did not confine hinm- 
self to illustration alone, but achieved a large measure of 
his success in painting, lithography, dry point and mono- 
type, only makes his achievement the greater. 

The biographical and critical text by Ralph Flint is 
full of the colloquial colour of the studios of that rich and 
formative period. The half tone plates, of which there are 
sixty-four, are unusually well printed, and comprise the best 
and most typical examples of this American artist's work. 

Altogether, CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN ARTISTS, if the series 
is as good as the first book, should prove a useful, instruc- 
tive and beautiful set of books, whose individual volumes will 


become a habit with lovers of art throughout the country. 


HI HT 


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9 eg eee” eee ee ss os 


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